This post is a follow up to an earlier post detailing some of my encounters and conversations with people who believe they have been abducted by aliens. Some who have followed previous writings of mine may find some informational redundancies but, while continuing my narrative, I also like each article to be able to stand alone…

*********

The UFO conference takes a delirious and sour turn with a presentation titled Mind-Control & UFOs: Who’s Really in Charge Here?, presented by a former Indonesian translator for the US State Department, Fred Burks.

On his website, Burks claims to have “interpreted for Bush, Clinton, Gore, Cheney, and many other top officials of the US and other countries. Having participated in numerous secret meetings where the only people allowed were the principals and their interpreters.” Consequently, “he has acquired important inside information and contacts.” It is upon this shaky foundation of credibility — the idea of the all-access functionary fully briefed upon the darkest, most subterranean state secrets — that Burks justifies his espousal of a conspiracy theory regarding secret government programs of Ritual Abuse, Mind-Control, and UFO cover-up.

Not that the conference has proven restrained in speculative leaps till now, what with an early presentation by a woman named Ann Eller, who told of her “praying mantis” spirit guide, her visions of extraterrestrial hieroglyphs, and her ability to sense the shape of the UFOs above us with but the power of her intuitive mind alone. Severely limiting her time as a prognosticator, but in keeping with the conference’s catastrophic millenarian subplot, Eller advised us that the end will likely come even before the much-publicized end of the Mayan calendar in 2012… though she finds credibility in the 2012 doomsday theory that states that a hidden planet, Planet X, “Niburu”, will bring upon The End when it collides with Earth.

We also have already heard from a speaker named Neil Freer who knows, as items of fact, not only that aliens have indeed been visiting us, but where they came from, their cultural peculiarities, and that they (these “Annunaki”) even manufactured homosapiens in an impetuous little past episode of genetic experimentation. The upshot of this revelation is that the juvenile little Creationist v. Evolution debate of ours is now resolved: “They are both partly correct”, Freer told his (no doubt relieved) audience.

Freer, in a sudden fit of candid lucidity, admitted that his “only basis for credibility here” is the unverifiable claim that he has “been at this” since the age of six… when he was first abducted by extraterrestrials. Outlandish, to say the least — But all of this uninhibited free-form folklore is undeniably entertaining.

Burks’s lecture, on the other hand, darkens the carefree stream-of-consciousness mood with its invocation of the terrestrial-based Invisible Hand — the secretive, highly organized, omnipresent “They” who manipulate world events and individual lives, ever inching themselves nearer to unconcealed and total domination.

Burks informs us that the government has been brainwashing innocent civilians into robotized slaves for use in assassinations and political blackmail plots. Chandra Levy — the Washington, D.C. Federal Bureau of Prisons intern who, upon investigation of her death in 2001, was found to have been involved in an extramarital affair with then-U.S. representative Gary Condit — was a blackmail “Manchurian Candidate”, we’re told. Memories are controlled and manipulated through hypnosis. In an instance where you have three witnesses to a UFO… and they’re each giving conflicting reports… their memories have probably been hypnotically jumbled regarding the details… All part of the UFO cover-up. Torture is being used to fracture the psyche’s of unwitting pawns into a controlled and contrived condition of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). There are documents to prove it all.

Reference to the mythic psychiatric diagnosis of MPD is hardly shocking, as it is a common contemporary accessory to the most crass and outrageous of paranoid delusions. Wherever I’ve found MPD, I’ve also found Conspiracy Theory… sometimes in the background, other times quite out in the open. The theory of MPD holds that some traumas can prove so ruinous to the victim’s psyche that, in order to cope with the reality of it, memory of the trauma is repressed, compartmentalized… hidden away. The mind is splintered, divided into separate personalities which “recurrently take control of the person’s behavior”. Treatment for this condition often relies upon the recovery of these repressed traumatic memories. The victim, it is presumed, must confront these hidden traumas so as to assimilate them into the conscious mind, thereby making the mind “whole” again.

Diagnosis of MPD — despite the suggested conspicuousness of such symptoms — is said to require the keen and dexterous wit of an experienced expert. Sudden changes in character aren’t always going to be apparent… No, this condition is a subtle beast. Upon gaining popularity in the 80s, many therapists began to discriminate dim clues to dormant alternative personalities in their clients’ most general manifestations of malaise. Anxiety? Depression? Hmm. Have you considered you may have been raped, only to forget all about it thereafter? To be sure, the memory is still there, it is “repressed” in your unconsciousness mind, exhibiting itself outwardly as this anxiety and depression you’re feeling…

This is a confusing scenario… no real way to argue against it. Here you presumably have a person in some form of mental distress, willing to submit to the authority of an “expert” to divine the reasons for this dysfunction. The “expert” suggests repressed memories. It’s futile and pointless for one to observe that she has no recollection of what she’s supposed to have forgotten. What’s more, “denial” is a common first response.

From such suspect beginnings, those diagnosed as having MPD may be brought under hypnosis, sodium amytal, guided imagery sessions, or just encouraged to try to remember the traumatic memories hidden within. Fleeting imagery of such scenarios in the mind, bad dreams… these can signal the surfacing of these memories. Under hypnosis, as an exorcist speaking to parasitic demons within, the therapist accesses the various personalities residing in the fractured individual, culling from them their unique, yet ultimately unified, histories.

It is axiomatic among therapists who subscribe to this recovered memory folly that their presumed “victims” must be believed. So it is that tales of long-running, episodic abuses of the most heinous variety are accepted at face-value, and in the face of lack of corroboration, or even falsifying evidence. This is where conspiracy theories spiral wildly unchecked… in the therapists office, behind client confidentiality… the therapist certain something sinister is afoot… the client trying to produce the right answers… fabrications and confabulations taken as historical truths… dis-confirming evidence is evidence of a massive, pervasive, world-engulfing cover-up…

Most everybody is aware of the idea of an MPD condition, as it has proven an intriguing plot device in good number of Hollywood fictions. Many people are also aware of MPD’s faddish rise in the 1980s, and its role in the “Satanic Panic” modern witch-hunts that resulted as MPD clients claimed to have recovered memories of involvement in horrible cult crimes. Few people, though, seem aware that nothing has really changed since the most public day-care abuse scandals and anti-satanic moral outrages… No censure of Recovered Memory Therapies from psychiatry’s primary officiating body, The American Psychiatric Association (APA). And despite a lack of scientific evidence in support of MPD as a naturally occurring condition, as opposed to an iatrogenic creation of insidiously coercive therapies — and against the protests of informed professionals in the field — the APA also intends to include MPD (under its current branding of “Dissociative Identity Disorder” [DID]) in their revised Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM), the next edition of which is due out within the next few years.

Worse, delusional therapists espousing vulgar and witless notions of fantasized conspiracies are still quite present, though having been discredited in the mainstream since those halcyon days when they found fleeting favor among daytime television audiences. Organizations like S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind-control And Ritual abuse Today) — coordinated by a man who claims to have been a brain-washed victim of the “Masonic/Illuminati” — host at their annual conferences, and publish in their newsletters, not only licensed therapists you may encounter in the field, but also characters like William Schnoebelen. The remarkable Mr. Schnoebelen warns of demonic UFOs, claims to have been a vampire, declares he achieved the rank of 90th degree Freemason, says he was a Satanic High Priest — even claims to have met Satan himself! — before awakening to the Glory of Christ. An organization called “Survivorship” (“For survivors of Ritual Abuse, mind control and torture and their allies”) provides on their website a helpful calendar of “Difficult Dates” which lists “satanic, nazi, and polytheistic cult holidays… compiled from reports by Surviorship members”, as well as advice on how to cope with “government/military mind control (MC)”. Survivorship offers regular professional “webinars” at $50 per session.

Burks, for his unhinged drivel regarding brain-washing and UFO cover-ups is by no means alone in his lunacy.

By the way, Burks also tells us, it turns out that the much-feared HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program), for all its talk of “ionospheric research”, is being misused by stir-crazy bunker-bound agents to mischievously alter our very moods and dispositions at random. Burks has felt these sudden mood changes himself. He’s receptive to these devious subtleties. So in tune is he, Fred explains, “I have a connection with beings who are not in bodies.”

He’s sorry to be the one to have to tell us about all of this unpleasantness. Really, he is. Burks reminds us, though, that depraved as their activities are, even these government agents who use ritual torture, methodical forms of trauma-inducing and mind-control-facilitating Satanic abuse… even they have a heart. Everybody has a heart. Everybody just wants to love and be loved. In fact, Burks digresses, why don’t we take a moment to feel our “heart energy”…

… Everybody has a heart…

We’re all instructed to breath deeply, in and out slowly, and let out a droning “om”.

Very good. Back to business. Time to face up to the savage facts…

Burks dives right in. His presumed evidence comes from records relating to the CIA’s Cold War era mind-control experiments that began in the 1950s, continuing till at least the late ’60s, under the project name of MK-Ultra. In particular, Burks draws some rather apocalyptic conclusions from a declassified document listed under CIA MORI ID 140401, dated 1 January, 1950 (when MK-Ultra was still known as “Bluebird”), wherein a series of sinister questions are explored:

A. Can accurate information be obtained from willing or unwilling individuals?

B. Can Agency-personnel (or persons of interest to this agency) be conditioned to prevent any outside power from obtaining information from them by any known means

C. Can we obtain control of the future activities (physical and mental) of any given individual, willing or unwilling by application of SI [Sleep Induction] and H [Hypnotic] techniques

D. Can we prevent any outside power from gaining, control of future activities (physical and mental) of agency personnel by any known means?

And there you have it…

But while Burks seems to assume that the answer to each of these questions must have been (or eventually became) ‘yes’, the document itself, when one bothers to look at it in its entirety, is more circumspect:

Bluebird believes that A (above) can be answered in the affirmative using SI and H techniques. Bluebird Is not fully satisfied with results to date, but believes with continued work and study remarkable and profitable results can be obtained regularly.

However, B, C, and D (above) are as yet unanswerable, although Bluebird is of the opinion that there is a worthwhile chance that all three may at some future date be answered affirmatively. This opinion is supported generally by numerous individuals having knowledge of these techniques and by much literature and intelligence in this field.

Since an affirmative proof of B, C and D would be of incredible value to this agency, Bluebird’s general problem is to get up, conduct and carry out research (practical – not theoretical) in this direction.

In a follow-up to the Bluebird document above, dated October 1966, and labeled MORI ID 18252 (a document that unfortunately escaped Burks’s attention), the CIA itemized the short-comings that caused them to ultimately adjudge hypnosis worthless as far as military applications are concerned:

“Disregarding the difficulties of inducing trance, there is still little assurance that a source can be made to act against his own best interests. A hypnotized subject, even when motivated to be cooperative, often distorts, invents memories, fabricates and otherwise contaminates his output. The more anxious he is about the information, the more likely he is to distort, as a means of defending. He is apt to tell the hypnotist what he wants to hear, whether or not it is related to fact.”

This declassified documentary material is available to anybody by way of Freedom Of Information Act request. Curiously, despite Burks’s proclaimed status as a former White House insider, he unveils no new or original material, nor does he provide anecdotes of evil-doings viewed from the inside. No talk of the “important inside information and contacts” directly gained from having “participated in numerous secret meetings where the only people allowed were the principals and their interpreters”. In fact most, if not all, of Burks’s presentation, I recognize in disgust, seems directly derived from a book titled Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists written by well-known dissociative disorders psychiatrist, Colin Ross. Incidentally, but weeks before this lecture, I interviewed a former client of Dr. Colin Ross who felt that her own Multiple Personality Disorder was the creation of a psychiatrist, but she has little doubt that the psychiatrist who created her condition was Dr. Ross himself.

The comment on hypnotic memory recall and false memory fabrication contained in the 1966 document is particularly compelling, as Burks’s (or rather, Ross’s) “evidence” for the conspiracy afoot is at least partly dependent upon narratives produced by subjects who revealed them during hypnotic regression performed in the service of MPD therapy.

In an address to the Fourth Annual Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality, delivered in 1992, it was an MPD specialist, Dr. Corydon Hammond, who elaborated upon the specifics of government brain-washing tactics. His speech, known as “The Greenbaum Speech” is a classic and influential piece of conspiracy folklore. During the Question & Answer segment following his presentation, Hammond admitted, “There isn’t great documentation of [this Machurian Candidate program]. It [the evidence] comes from victims who are imperiled witnesses.” But from these “imperiled witnesses”, Hammond managed to dig out repressed memories which outlined some very specific elements, including the meanings of Greek Letter code words used by cult programmers to activate scripted functions in the hapless “Manchurian”:

“Alphas appear to represent general programming, the first kind of things put in. Betas appear to be sexual programs. For example, how to perform oral sex in a certain way, how to perform sex in rituals, having to do with producing child pornography, directing child pornography, prostitution. Deltas are killers trained in how to kill in ceremonies. There’ll also be some self-harm stuff mixed in with that, assassination and killing. Thetas are called psychic killers. You know, I had never in my life heard those two terms paired together. I’d never heard the words “psychic killers” put together, but when you have people in different states, including therapists inquiring and asking, “What is Theta,” and patients say to them, “Psychic killers,” it tends to make one a believer that certain things are very systematic and very widespread. […] Then there’s Omega. […] Omega has to do with self-destruct programming. Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. This can include self-mutilation as well as killing-themselves programming. Gamma appears to be system-protection and deception programming which will provide misinformation to you, try to misdirect you, tell you half-truths, protect different things inside. There can also be other Greek letters.”

Speaking to therapists, Hammond said, “I’d recommend that you go and get your entire Greek alphabet…”

The former patient of Ross’s, whom I interviewed, clearly felt she was swayed toward a Conspiracy Theory-based false recollection of events as Ross probed her mind for evidence of this Greek Alphabet programming:

“[…] my father was in the military. This was when I was a tiny little girl, he was in the Air Force. And for Colin Ross, for anybody who’s ever been in the military, he just makes the immediate leap into CIA, for crying out loud. He asked me if the words – what was it? – ‘beta’… ‘gamma’… and, um… ‘omega’, I think it was [meant anything to me]. Those three. He said that children were put in to CIA experiments where they used goggles on [the children’s] eyes and hypnotized [them]. [The CIA programmed personalities] were either one of those: beta, omega, alpha, one of those. One [of these designations programmed the child so that they] would commit suicide, one would be given the job to dispense disinformation, the other was […] an assassin. I just thought ‘gamma’ sounds too stupid, ‘alpha’ sounds like alphabet soup, for crying out loud, I think I chose Omega, or something like that. I chose the one that sounded the least stupid to me, because I was just trying to cooperate with him. There was just no way you could argue with him. He’d always just twist things around. You couldn’t possibly argue with him. He’d always just say that you fit the description, absolutely fit the description. It has to be this.”

Claiming to be extremely cautious so a not to “lead the client”, Hammond described how he would probe for answers during hypnosis, saying, “I want a part inside who knows something about Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Theta to come up to a level where you can speak to me and when you’re here say, ‘I’m here.'”

Hammond explained, “I would not ask if a part was willing to [speak]. No one’s going to particularly want to talk about this. I would just say, “I want some part who can tell me about this to come out.”

“My best guess is that the purpose of it is that they [the satanists] want an army of Manchurian candidates — tens of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, do child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, do snuff films, all sorts of lucrative things and do their bidding. And eventually, the megalomaniacs at the top believe, [they will] create a satanic order that will rule the world.”

This is the foul witch-hunting core of conspiracist speculation, and the narrative of government programs of Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control is but the evil twin of Alien Abduction folklore. Not only are both largely dependent upon the presumed reliability of “recovered memories”, but both contain many of the same plot elements… elements that appear to be universal, archetypal, to the entranced ramblings from which they are derived. Clinical Psychologist, Dr. Gwen L. Dean, compiled an exhausting list of such parallels, among which we find:

Both Abductees and victims of Ritual Abuse recall being laid upon a table… for examination in the case of abductees — an alter in the Satanic version.

Needles, blades, and high-tech gear are often used by Aliens and Satanists alike.

In both scenarios the victim (or “experiencer”) is likely to view bizarre symbols, occult or other-worldly.

Both Aliens and Satanists are said to use tracking devices on their subjects.

Both narratives often have a focus upon genitalia and breeding… Both Aliens and Satanists are said to take infants.

Aliens and Satanists both seem to know everything about their victim/subject’s life and family, and both Abduction and Ritual Abuse are said to occur in a transgenerationally (meaning they run in the family).

Often, believers will point to the broad consistency of these narratives spanning wide geographic areas as evidence that they are based in reality. But a study carried out by a Dr. Alvin H. Lawson in collaboration with Dr. W. C. McCall and John De Herrera showed that the consistency present in alleged alien abductions could also be found in tales of abduction concocted under hypnosis by people with no significant interest in UFOs or ETs. “the Imaginary Abductee study, in which sixteen volunteers were hypnotized and given imaginary UFO or CE3 (for Close Encounters of the Third Kind) abductions” concluded that the “uninformed Imaginary subjects’ narratives contained dozens of detailed and subtle similarities with real CE3 reports, and no significant differences.” Lawson, who was an abduction believer prior to the study, explains:

“We started the Imaginary study with what turned out to be a set of boneheaded assumptions. First, we were nearly certain that the Imaginary narratives would be superficial, vague, and predictable because we thought subjects would be echoing details from media stories, films, and stale UFO lore. Related to that was our second expectation: we were ready to bet the farm that Imaginary abductions would contrast dramatically in particular ways with “real” CE3, so that we would eventually learn specifically how to tell hoaxers from actual abductees. Thus we fully expected the Imaginary study to be a kind of touchstone for determining the “truth” of CE3 claims.”

The whole thing ultimately made an “informed skeptic” of the doctor. The same study has not, as far as I know, been performed with the Ritual Abuse narrative (and it is unethical, I believe, to attempt it), but I’ve no doubt it would yield the same results.

The parallel between narratives of Ritual Abuse and those involving Alien Abduction was brought to the attention of Dr. Hammond during the Q & A following his “Greenbaum Speech”:

Q: It seems to me that there seems to be some similarity between these kinds of programming and those people who claim that they’ve been abducted by spaceships and have had themselves physically probed and reprogrammed and all of that sort of thing. Since Cape Canaveral is across the Florida peninsula from me and I don’t think that they’ve reported any spaceships lately, I was just wondering is there any sort of relationship between this and that?

Dr.H: I’ll share my speculation, that comes from others really. I’ve not dealt with any of those people. However, I know a therapist that I know and trust and respect who I’ve informed about all this a couple of years ago and has found it in a lot of patients and so on, who is firmly of the belief that those people are in fact ritual-abuse victims who have been programmed with that sort of thing to destroy all their credibility. If somebody’s coming in and reporting abduction by a flying saucer who’s going to believe them on anything else in the future? Also as a kind of thing that can be pointed to and said, “This is as ridiculous as that.”

Though the average Ritual Abuse narrative is not any more plausible than those involving Alien Abduction — often invoking common Blood Libel accusations, supernatural interventions, and depopulating crimes of mass murder which have managed to remain concealed from the complaisant common folk — Ritual Abuse conspiracists have benefited from the liberty of being able to withdraw their tales back into a basic framework of real-world components if critical inquiry comes to be too severe. In fact, they often seem willing to abandon their own personal tales of suffered Satanic sexual sadism to circumvent the skeptic’s scrutiny. You doubt that there is an international cult of Satanists that has infiltrated the highest levels of the world’s governments, oppressing the lives of mostly middle-aged, white, American females by secretly traumatizing them into a condition of multiple personalities? Well, you see, that’s just a caricature of our position… a straw-man… Really, what we’re saying is uncontroversial — merely that extreme trauma can result in traumatic amnesia, and that these “repressed memories” may later be recalled with accuracy.

You will find that in saying this the Ritual Abuse believer is not, in fact, abandoning the narrative of world-wide Satanic conspiracy. The believer is merely trying to lead you through the proper steps to “understanding”. Once you understand that the premise is sound and scientific — that repressed memories can be surfaced to divulge uncomfortable historical truths — you must, then, accept that these stories of Satanic Abuse are on sound footing… not at all the hysterical ravings you might naively first take them for. Also, you must understand that traumas regarding Child Sexual Abuse are particularly prone to being repressed.

And so, to call “bullshit” on so-called recovered memories of even the most lunatic conspiracies is to find oneself accused of defending pedophilia. In this way, the conspiracy theorist holds victims of actual abuse hostage to his pornographic fantasies, attempting to create an environment in which their untenable claims must be accepted on an equal level with legitimate claims of sexual assault, and to reject one is to deny the other as well.

Hammond’s assertion that Alien Abduction narratives can be implanted to discredit true tales of Ritual Abuse raises a whole other series of questions, whether one believes in a Satanic conspiracy or not. Could Hammond, or any other therapist, reliably distinguish true memories of abuse from the possibility of more plausible “screen memories” that don’t involve aliens? And if one can invoke this type of false memory to explain away Alien Abduction, the idea of a False Memory Syndrome surely mustn’t sound too entirely preposterous …Though the words “False Memory Syndrome” are often enough to provoke stammering, convulsive protests from Satanic Abuse believers.

The idea of a False Memory Syndrome was put forward by an organization started by a “group of families and professionals affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution in Baltimore […] in 1992 because they saw a need for an organization that could document and study the problem of families that were being shattered when adult children suddenly claimed to have recovered repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.” Their website explains, “Across the country, parents had been reporting that they had received phone calls and letters accusing them of committing horrifying acts that allegedly had happened decades earlier.” They are called The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), and they describe the condition thus (in a definition penned by one John Kihlstrom):

“When the memory is distorted, or confabulated, the result can be what has been called the False Memory Syndrome; a condition in which a person’s identity and interpersonal relationships are centered around a memory of traumatic experience which is objectively false but in which the person strongly believes. Note that the syndrome is not characterized by false memories as such. We all have memories that are inaccurate. Rather, the syndrome may be diagnosed when the memory is so deeply ingrained that it orients the individual’s entire personality and lifestyle, in turn disrupting all sorts of other adaptive behaviors. The analogy to personality disorder is intentional. False memory syndrome is especially destructive because the person assiduously avoids confrontation with any evidence that might challenge the memory. Thus it takes on a life of its own, encapsulated, and resistant to correction. The person may become so focused on the memory that he or she may be effectively distracted from coping with the real problems in his or her life.”

Acting as an outreach for those affected by false memories, the FMSF has been instrumental in spreading awareness regarding the potential dangers of digging for repressed memories.

Hammond seemed to agree that traumatic false memories do exist, apparently only disagreeing with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as to how they are created. While the FMSF asserts that false memories can be created in the course of Recovered Memory Therapies, Hammond suggests that false memories are implanted by Satanic government agents practicing mind-control on unwitting subjects. Other proponents of Recovered Memory accuracy — appalled and offended that anybody might suggest that such dubious recollections be corroborated when personal liberties of accused parents, or other relations to the alleged victim, are at risk — disown Satanic Ritual Abuse as readily as Hammond dismissed Alien Abduction… References to such, if mentioned in the course of debate at all, are seen as but low-brow attempts by crude individuals (such as myself) to discredit all recovered memories. (Oddly enough, though today’s recovered memory defender might disown Hammond’s more obnoxious of lunatic fantasies, they certainly don’t disown Hammond himself, who can still be found in any citation list supporting the notion of repressed memory accuracy — alongside co-authors Sheflin and Brown.) But the same questions that apply to Hammond apply just as easily to any defender of repressed memory theory. Could any of them distinguish a true memory from a plausible false memory not involving Satanic Abuse or Alien Abduction? Often, the Recovered Memory crowd will deny that traumatic false memories can be created at all, never bothering to explain away the very real evidence that these memories are traumatic to both those who have come to believe in their victimization by either extraterrestrials or Satanists.

“To investigate this issue, we measured heart rate, skin conductance, and left lateral frontalis electromyographic responses in individuals who reported having been abducted by space aliens. Recordings of these participants were made during script-driven imagery of their reported alien encounters and of other stressful, positive, and neutral experiences they reported. We also measured the psychophysiological responses of control participants while they heard the scripts of the abductees. We predicted that if ‘‘memories’’ of alien abduction function like highly stressful memories, then psychophysiological reactivity to the abduction and stressful scripts would be greater than reactivity to the positive and neutral scripts, and this effect would be more pronounced among abductees than among control participants.”

“Relative to control participants,” McNally and his team concluded, “abductees exhibited greater psychophysiological reactivity to abduction and stressful scripts than to positive and neutral scripts.” The abductees’ responses, it turned out, were even comparable to those of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients who had listened to scripts of their actual traumatic experiences. Clearly, the abduction phenomenon poses a unique challenge to those who insist upon recovered memory validity, deny the existence of traumatic false memories, yet disregard stories involving ETs.

But, of course, Burks has none of the aversion to Abduction tales that Hammond expressed following his Greenbaum Speech. Eventually, we even hear from one of his Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control victims who recounts an event in which she was gang-raped by military personnel in an underground bunker while bemused grey aliens half-heartedly observed.

During the Question & Answer session following Burks’s presentation, I approach the microphone:

Doug: Do you feel the False Memory Syndrome Foundation works directly with MK-Ultra to cover-up mind-control?

Fred: Yup. Thank you. I’m fairly certain the False Memory Foundation IS part of the cover-up. (applause)…and it is not people who just (indistinguishable). So I would not trust most the things – now some of those people DON’T EVEN KNOW that they’re being manipulated. That’s important to realize. They’re not all of them consciously in with the power elite. It’s really important to recognize that, that they’ve been misled into trying to debunk stuff that is actually real.

There is a sizeable smattering of indignant applause. At first, I’m only a bit disconcerted to note the number of people who seem to hold the FMSF in bitter contempt. The conference room fits a couple hundred people, about a quarter of which apparently understand my question well enough to applaud it. Slowly, I feel panicked horror begin to over-take me. I suddenly feel surrounded by irrational moral crusaders… witch-hunters. I shall be marked as one with Satanic loyalties to dark, hidden societies – hell-bent on discrediting the research, and besmearing the names, of all those who threaten to reveal the process and purpose of this hideous mind-control plot — if I speak my opinion to any of them.

It seems not to matter how many retractors tell of the irresponsible therapy that had once convinced them of False Memory narratives that were demonstrably untrue. They are but agents of disinformation sent out to conceal the tragic truth of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Alien Abduction. It matters not the studies by respectable scientific researchers that demonstrate the unreliability of recovered memories and the relative ease with which false memories, even unpleasant or traumatic ones, may be planted. Doctors Loftus, McHugh, Pope, McNally, et al. – all of them part of the cover-up. Are their studies reproducible? Doesn’t matter. Disregard them. These studies, their data, are but Satanic propaganda with the power to pollute the mind, clever and insidious misinformation constructed to fool even the critical elite within the UFO Congress.

And one’s very presence at the UFO Congress conference is enough to assure that they may be counted among the critical elite. We at the conference could see through the media’s government sponsored lies and disinformation. This fact alone, the fact that these conference goers knew well enough to see past the foul lies and accept the fact of ET activity on our own planet, made them experts in various other fields in which they had no formal training. Many speakers appeal to the intuitive expertise of this outsider elite in their lectures. Several times we are shown images of what is now known as the “Norwegian Spiral“, video footage of a misfired Russian missile over Norway on December 13, 2009. The missile fired into the atmosphere during the night leaving striking blue luminous contrails and a wide spiral of leaked jet-fuel in its wake. The effect was spectacular, the images and video can be easily be found online. The effect was so striking, in fact, it could not possibly be but the image of a wayward missile. Surely, a more rational explanation – despite the fact that the Russians fully own-up to the mis-fire – is that an inter-dimensional portal was temporarily opened, by extraterrestrials, over Norway. Does that look like a missile to you? We are more than once asked. Many laugh at the absurdity of the missile theory. Of course, I seriously doubt that any of them had actually previously witnessed a missile mis-fire against which the Norwegian Spiral could be compared.

Days after his lecture, I approach Burks in the conference room. Unlike the other Ritual Abuse enthusiasts I’ve encountered, Fred Burks seems remarkably amiable and approachable. A friendly fellow, I begin to wonder if he isn’t just a well-meaning buffoon who hasn’t simply been misled. I ask if he has had any personal contact with the conspiracy-mongering Dr. Ross. Ross, as I suspected, is a hero to Burks, who reported that he has tried repeatedly to contact Ross. Ross’s failure to reply, Burks speculates, is due to an offending email that Burks had sent him asking for confirmation – citation – for a claim made in Bluebird. “I asked him for citation for a line in Bluebird that claimed that children were used in [MK-Ultra] experiments. I don’t think he had it…”

Dr. Ross, I explained to Fred Burks, has problems of his own at the moment. Then I smart-assedly directed Burks to a website containing “some guy’s” article exposing staggering malpractice claims against Ross. Of course, the article was my own, but I sincerely wondered what Burks would make of the well-documented accusations supported by sworn affidavits and professional testimony. He was unshaken. “I’m surprised [Ross] doesn’t get more trouble like this,” he commented. The article, it seemed, could be dismissed as a mere “attack” – not to be considered credible, no matter what sources the article cited.

Very well, then. How about that Greenbaum Speech, eh?

Burks describes the Greenbaum Speech as “amazing”, and I have to agree. We’re both utterly stricken by the speech in our own ways.

I ask Burks if he is aware of the works of famed hypnotist Milton Erickson and, in particular, Erickson’s many attempts, and failures, to achieve high-level mind-control in his clients. (That is to say, Erickson was unable to make them react in ways they believed would bring harm unto themselves or otherwise respond well-outside their moral boundaries.)

Yes, Burks is aware of Erickson, but he is not at all sure how much Erickson really knew. Then, creepily, Burks mentions the amazing power that Erickson must have wielded over his female clients, suggesting that he must have taken full advantage of that situation, because, “Hey, face it. Any normal man would.”

I’m not at all sure what to make of this, so I just shake his hand and we part ways.

Later that evening, I find myself in the hotel bar with a group of abductees. My fear that everybody will descend upon me and have me burned at a stake has abated, and I’m having easy conversation over some drinks in a low-lit obscure, comfortable corner. My abductee society are amiable, easy to speak to. I feel less like an interloping undercover skeptic, and more like just another conference-goer with his own unique opinion.

“What do you think of the whole 2012 thing?” the fellow on my left asks.

I see no need to pretend I find merit in this particular doomsday scenario. I shrug and grimace. Before I say anything, he says, “Doesn’t seem like you give it much credit.”

“Well…” I say, doing my best to sound diplomatic, “The problem is that, in my life-time alone, so many Ends-of-the-World have come and gone…”

He nods as his features are overcome with intrigue. “That’s interesting… so, you’ve experienced the End of the World before…!”

From the abstract: “Using a standard medical index, PsycINFO, we counted the number of indexed publications involving dissociative amnesia and dissociative identity disorder listed for each year. We then compared these rates with those of well-established diagnoses […]”

“Dissociative amnesia and dissociative identity disorder have not generated consistent scientific interest over the years, but instead apparently enjoyed a brief period of fashion that now has waned. Overall, our observations suggest that these diagnostic entities presently do not command widespread scientific acceptance.”

There is a cover up – but it’s not a cover up of UFOs/SRAs. It’s a coverup of what the real experiments are… brain to behavior study. Dissociation (not MPD) and delusions are a very big part of that. MK Ultra had more to do with the brain and effects of chemistry on the brain than it did about Fidel Castro’s beard or the Manchurian Candidate. These things are all coverups and real victims do exist. Suggestibility is a big part of the ongoing experiments and a way to get rid of victims. Social defeat, anxiety, manipulation of dopamine levels, and seizure like symptoms + the real disinfo people who try to make victims more paranoid and more suggestible to nonsense = a way to get rid of victims, not let unwitting victims find out they are victims, and cover up some of the worst crimes against humanity committed within the US.

signed, a victim (who happens to be a social scientist)

vindalf April 10, 2011
2:33 am

A fascinating read, Mr. Crude Individual!

(I hope to see you at the next meeting of the “Crude Individuals Conspiring to Sabotage Meticulously Constructed Visions of Repressed Truths with Vulgar Fact” Association]

I’m going to post some additional information/comments about the necessity for unquestioning belief in the claims of persons alleging any kind of victimization, over in the Meredith Maran Interview comment thread.

The graph representing Professional interest in DID over time is interesting.
I’ve been ‘strolling’ around corners of the ‘net where DID remains a persistent & popular topic, lately. A current trend seems to be disavowal or discarding of clinical-medical interpretation for DID – in favor of “re-storying” former “victims”, “sufferers” or simply “patients” supposedly possessing multiple personalities, as uniquely blessed & gifted individuals possessing powers beyond the comprehension of us “onesies”. Sample quotes:
“I believe the carriers of these personalities have an amazing power of escape that many of us cannot fathom”
“It is a power and not a disorder and it is amazing”.

Perhaps DID will eventually atrophy as a purportedly “medical” phenomenon and return to its original residence as a paranormal/spiritual phenomenon.

In your above article, you commented on irritatingly persistent irrational belief in “abnormal” powers of perception:
“These studies, their data, are but Satanic propaganda with the power to pollute the mind, clever and insidious misinformation constructed to fool even the critical elite within the UFO Congress.
And one’s very presence at the UFO Congress conference is enough to assure that they may be counted among the critical elite. We at the conference could see through the media’s government sponsored lies and disinformation. This fact alone, the fact that these conference goers knew well enough to see past the foul lies and accept the fact of ET activity on our own planet, made them experts in various other fields in which they had no formal training. Many speakers appeal to the intuitive expertise of this outsider elite in their lectures”.

“intuitive expertise of this outsider elite” – hmm, sounds like something I’ve encountered before…differing terminologies for similar concepts? Yes, by golly – HERE IT IS AGAIN! That “special gift” for abnormal insight, enabling the (self-defined) special and uniquely blessed individual to flawlessly perform deductive inferences of unacknowledged abuse – among other powers they might possess.

Regardless of the terminology it may be draped in, this is all witch-doctor (or witch-finder) hocus-pocus “magical” claptrap. The root delusion – suffered by innumerable persons spanning the spectrum from intellectually brilliant academics to dunder-headed con-artists, from Freud himself to the likes of Colin Ross and Kathleen Sullivan, the root delusion suffered by nearly every conspiracy theorist of any stripe – is the unfounded belief that they are divinely (or at least, super-naturally) gifted persons, possessing abnormal powers of perception & insight equivalent to paranormal/magical ‘powers’. Sometimes they attribute their ‘powers’ to some form of magical skrying device – such as “symptom checklists” – but again the claim that such ‘devices’ need to be ‘interpreted’ by someone specially gifted in that “art”.

In the case of Freud and all the MPD-DID/ ritual abuse/ mind control therapists, there has been this persistent delusion that they can “diagnose” LIFE EVENTS from their client’s psychiatric/psychological maladies, which is delusional, magical thinking. “Diagnosis” is only a valid concept for deductions about underlying medical conditions/pathologies, derived from related symptoms. Life events are not “conditions” or pathologies, they cannot be “diagnosed”. Claiming to be able to diagnose life events is the equivalent of claiming to possess psychic abilities.

gigi May 8, 2011
4:24 pm

Doug,

I’ve read through several of your articles and they are quite a refreshing perspective!

I would love for you to weigh in on the memory aspect of the posts as well as your thoughts on diagnosis.

gigi May 8, 2011
4:26 pm

Oh, and for the record…I am neither a believer or non-believer of mind control and ritual abuse. I’m quite “on the fence” in the whole debate which is why I am interested in your perspective and opinion. It seems somewhat difficult to find someone who is willing to analyze facts without preconceived notions.

Thanks!
gigi

doug May 10, 2011
2:25 pm

gigi – thanks for the link. i stopped by the page and perused it a bit, but i’d like to give it a more thorough read before commenting.

please excuse the delay, i’ve been away for a bit, and i’m now catching up.

vindalf – i have been looking through the link you posted. incredible material. very well done. do you contribute to that blog or know the person working on it?

intuitive expertise and supernormal powers of perception seemed to abound last week (at least where i was) as people speculated as to what “really happened” in the killing of osama bin laden. a lot of people, it seems, will doubt the “official story” as a matter of philosophical obligation. they seem to rely not on critical thinking means of evaluating information, but rather adhere to a polarized distinction between official stories, which are always lies, and alternative versions, which are probably true if only for the reason that those telling them have “no reason to lie about it”. this was an oft repeated line at the UFO conference. some extremely far-flung scenarios were accepted on the grounds that the claimant was presumed to have no reason to lie. but then, the reasons could be obscure and unknowable…

in the case of bin laden’s death, his actually NOT having been killed (either having died previously on his own, or being still alive in some speculations) seemed to serve no explanatory function for anything. there was no glaring discrepancy in the official story (that i could determine) that seemed to be reconciled with the idea that we’d been lied to. i didn’t hear any explanation as to why, if bin laden truly wasn’t in a suburb of pakistan, pakistan would allow the world to think he was — arguably at their expense. why would al-qaeda play along with this ruse by confirming his death amidst oaths of revenge? or is all this, too, simply manufactured content that the monolithic monster known as “the media” would like us to believe?

i fear that this knee-jerk pseudo-skepticism has become almost something of a social norm. after all, fools believe what “they” tell them… and none of us wants to be a fool, do we? in place of critical evaluation we simply discard what the “so-called experts” tell us, and consider instead the narratives of those outsiders who have no reason to lie (even if they do). what people need is a better understanding of how to evaluate information, starting from semantic logic and building up. it would be nice if therapists had some training in this regard, in which case you’d never see anybody in the field promoting something as asinine and worthless as the “extreme abuse survey”, an online retrospective survey exploring a non-phenomenon, circulated among its true believers, and then put into percentages — because percentages look scientific and neat… and that must prove something. of course, a version of the EAS could be circulated among abductees to gain a composite of their collective experiences in alien spacecrafts, and then we could put that data into percentages, but it really wouldn’t prove the existence of kidnapping ETs, would it?

you might be right about DID fading back into the spiritual. in which case it might end up where it began — treated by exorcists rather than medical imitators. to be sure, exorcism has always had a very apparent overlap with MPD/DID. there was a dr. olsen, who treated a woman named nadeen cool for MPD, who utilized exorcism in his treatments. this was learned during his malpractice trial, but this maliciously moronic medical hack is still in practice today. exorcism was claimed in the case of tyo v. colin ross, et al.

respected author of banal platitudes, scott peck, who wrote ‘the road less traveled’ wrote a follow-up book (that was decidedly less read) that relating his advanced medical wisdom regarding the cause of MPD: demons creating mischief. he endorsed exorcism. and why not? an exorcism appears orders of magnitude healthier than the family destroying victim narratives weighed upon those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the “care” of a DID “expert”.

vindalf May 29, 2011
9:25 am

Doug – I’ve posted a temporary email address, in a comment to an article, on some other blog that you are associated with.

Very soon, I will begin publicly discussing the first “SRA survivors” – deliberately created frauds – who traveled around North America, attending feminist-run incest & CSA victim co-counselling groups briefly in various locations, and may also have appeared in hospital’s emergency rooms in the guise of failed suicide attempts, gaining access to psychiatric wards, their patients and their staff.

I’m going to give Dr Ross and some others a chance to publicly disclose what they might know about these frauds, before I make my own disclosure.

For now, here’s some intriguing info to ponder:

“The Synanon organization, initially a drug rehabilitation program [primarily for heroin addicts], was founded…in 1958…By the early 1960s, Synanon had also become an alternative community, attracting people with its emphasis on living a self-examined life, as aided by group truth-telling sessions that came to be known as the “Synanon Game”. Synanon ultimately became the cultish Church of Synanon in the 1970s, and Synanon disbanded permanently in 1989 due to many criminal activities, including attempted murder, and civil legal problems, including Federal tax-evasion problems…” – wikipedia

“Co-counselling…is a grassroots, low-cost method of personal change based on reciprocal peer counselling. It uses simple methods that can be seen as a refinement of “you tell me your problems and I’ll tell you mine”. In particular, time is shared equally and the essential requirement of the person taking their turn in the role of counsellor is to do their best to listen and give their full attention to the other person. It is not a discussion; the aim is to support the person in the client role to work through their own issues in a mainly self-directed way. ‘Counselors’ have no training or expertise by which to evaluate serious problems. Co-counselling was originally formulated in the early 1950s by the American Harvey Jackins…Jackins founded the Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) Communities…” – wikipedia

Synanon begat “The Seed” and “Straight Inc.”, as well as Odyssey House:

“In 1966 New York City Mayor John Lindsay hired Puerto Rican psychiatrist Efren Esteban Ramirez to run the city’s Addiction Services Agency. Dr. Ramirez once told a reporter that the best way to get a “strung-out junkie interested” was to “‘confront him’ with a rehabilitated addict, so he can work his way out of his own doubts by watching the reformed addict.” [Synanon had run a program in Puerto Rico.] Ramirez set up the synanon-based Phoenix House which hired former Synanite Ted Dibble to manage one of its centers. Phoenix House is one of the biggest TCs today. Psychiatrist Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber visited Dr. Ramirez in Puerto Rico and setup her own synanon-based TC in New York City called Odyssey House”

Psychiatrist and lawyer Judianne Densen-Gerber founded Odyssey House, a residential drug-rehabilitation [primarily heroin addicts] community, in New York in 1966. Odyssey House residents were mostly female heroin addicts with a history of incest and juvenile prostitution.

Densen-Gerber was a pioneer in moving understanding of and approach to incest (and later, all forms of child sexual abuse) from the realm of criminal sexual pathology – emphasis on perpetrator’s sexual neurosis and criminal behaviour – to the realm of medicine and health promotion – emphasis on the victim, their medical-psychiatric treatment and epidemiological models for evaluating and responding to social problems with medical consequences. Specifically, in a study by Jean Benward and Judianne Densen-Gerber, “Incest as a causative factor in antisocial behavior: an exploratory study”, 1975.

Densen-Gerber was also a pioneer and accomplished practitioner of fear-based Social Marketing and social change campaigns:

“Social marketing began as a formal discipline in 1971, with the publication of “Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change” in the Journal of Marketing by marketing experts Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman
Speaking of what they termed “social change campaigns”, Kotler and Ned Roberto introduced the subject by writing, “A social change campaign is an organized effort conducted by one group (the change agent) which attempts to persuade others (the target adopters) to accept, modify, or abandon certain ideas, attitudes, practices or behavior.” – wikipedia

Densen-Gerber’s greatest, acknowledged, success as a fear-based social change campaigner, came in the late 1970s. In the mid 1970s, there had been a genuine social emergency in America involving organized pedophiles exploiting lax regulation of various child care and child services organizations. Totally fraudulent “care homes” and “recreation camps” for boys had been established by organized pedophiles, and were being used to produce commercial child pornography. This crisis had been dealt with by law enforcement, before Densen-Gerber became aware of it, but she was instrumental in lobbying efforts that forced State and Federal governments to create legislation criminalizing the production, distribution or possession of child pornography specifically & separately from the more general “obscene materials” laws.

To achieve the creation and passing of this – objectively important and necessary – legislation, Densen-Gerber employed a number of tactics. She was quite ruthless – she used deliberately exaggerated data about the number of minors involved in juvenile prostituion and pornography, about the number of commercial child pornography products ‘on the market’ at that time, about the profitability of those products, as well as references to a completely fictitious child trafficking & prostitution ring. She mailed examples of commerial child porn to legislators, she displayed heart-breaking examples of child porn in her lectures and seminars – forcing “freedom of speech” zealots in the audience to confront the terrible reality of these materials. “Look at this! Look at it! Don’t turn away, don’t try to pretend this doesn’t exist!” she would say.

She testified at State & Federal government hearings on the subject, sometimes alongside “investigative journalist” (HAH!) Ken Wooden (who would later produce the first satanism special for 20/20). She made extensive use of “concerned citizens” and “concerned parents” organizations, giving lectures and presentations on juvenile prostitution and pornography all over North America, to informal, local citizen’s groups as well as chapters of national child welfare charities.

“Who, then are these “survivors” and what’s their connection to ritual abuse accusations? Sherrill Mulhern, who has spent years studying traditional cults and modern groups like Jonestown, began researching the “survivors” and their therapists about five years ago. She soon realized that she was looking not at a real cult, but at people linked by a delusionary belief in one.
Many “survivors,” Mulhern says, are former teen runaways who lived on the streets and took up prostitution – behavior typical of incest victims”

Odyssey House, “a treatment center for drug addicts, many of whom were also multiples [MPD]”, ran “programs for teenage prostitutes and a house for addicted mothers”…

“The teacher for this class [for law enforcement, on the subject of SRA] was a self-admitted former drug addict, prostitute and mental patient from California who claimed she was imprisoned as a child in a cult that aborted fetuses from her womb and ate them…” – Debby Nathan

“The stories (about different aspects of cult rituals) are very much the same, whether it’s someone reporting about a ceremony in Melbourne, Australia,[there is an Odyssey House in Victoria Australia], Vermont [there is an Odyssey House in Vermont], or Utah [there is an Odyssey House in Utah]” – Judianne Densen-Gerber

(Doug, I hope you can get the Austin Public Library in Texas to unblock your site. I’m on vacation and finally able to access it again!)

I was hoping to see more about Neil Brick and his band of Manchurian Candidates. I have been following an active group of others like them who tend to gather in a couple of hate forums where they list the names of people they have targetted for “intervention”. These professional victims-of-their-own-delusions are getting more dangerous all the time because they have been able to take advantage of a totally dumbed-down population with their fake credentials and the media’s willingness to exploit and support their bizarre tales.